Windows 10 could get a performance-enhancing 'game mode'

[Jos]

Microsoft sort of neglected Windows as a gaming platform for a few years by prioritizing its Xbox gaming console instead. Lately, however, the company has taken steps to converge both ecosystems and bring PC gaming back into the limelight. More improvements could be on the way, if a recently leaked DLL file is any indication, suggesting a new “Game Mode” might arrive in the upcoming Creators Update.

The file was spotted in a recently leaked build of Windows 10 (14997). It isn’t functional yet, but according to Windows Central, it will enhance the PC gaming experience by minimizing resources used by running apps to almost nothing and allocating freed up resources when launching a game. The report notes that this is similar to how Xbox One handles resources when running a game.

WindowsCentral also speculates on whether Game Mode will work exclusively with games from the Windows Store, or any Windows title from third party sources like Steam or Origin.

Microsoft has yet to confirm the existence of the new “game mode,” but with the Creators Update due in the early part of 2017, Windows Insiders could get an early peek in a few weeks. Other gaming-centric features arriving with this update include support for game broadcasting and an Arena tournament feature that lets players create their own tournaments to compete with friends.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/67561-windows-10-could-get-performance-enhancing-game-mode.html

 

[psycros]

Cool! Can we also get a "non-insane" mode that mimics Windows 7 (without the useless "command bar" in Explorer) to go with that?

 

[Nobina]

If it's exclusive to games from Store then it's useless.

 

[wiyosaya]

Personally, I would rather have reliable Windows 10 updates that don't break useful things like automatic hibernation, or leave a computer completely useless for days while you try to figure out what the frack happened. When M$ masters reliable updates, then they should deliver "upgrades".

Oh wait, I forgot. Reliable updates were delivered to Windows 7. The crap updates of late make me think that M$ re-released Windows 3.1/NT and plopped "10" on it to make people think they were getting an "upgrade" while adding lots of useless bloat ware and bling to ensure that it ran slower so people would upgrade to M$ hardware.

 

[BSim500]

Isn't this just an admission of how bloated it's got over time? Still running Windows 7 here and background CPU usage in Process Explorer is an insignificant 1% split between "System", Interrupts and DWM (Desktop Windows Manager with Aero fully enabled). Disabling Aero drops it by all of 0.2%. Biggest single thing you can do to reduce game stutter is disable the real-time aspect of any installed anti-virus / anti-Malware scanners, and just schedule a regular full scan when you're eating dinner, grocery shopping, walking the dog, etc.

 

[Kunming]

Let's get one thing straight: Windows doesn't enhance games. Games enhance Windows.

Without games, you might as well draw the blinds and install Linux.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Without games, you might as well draw the blinds and install Linux.

I'd love to argue with you on that, but I feel as if you are correct. Windows would die if the gaming world shifted to Linux. Because one by one everything else non-game wise would follow suite.

 

[Kunming]

I'd love to argue with you on that, but I feel as if you are correct. Windows would die if the gaming world shifted to Linux. Because one by one everything else non-game wise would follow suite.

Yeah it's like, outside of games... What else is there, besides software whose only right to exist comes from companies who can't bother to make their "industry-leading" lines of code work on other platforms, because they wouldn't make as much money that way or something.

Then people would perhaps eventually start to realize how lame windows really is, when you compare it to more decent OS's - even MacOS.

I would love to argue with you too! But you're much more intelligent and kind than me, so I don't want to, because I would just lose.

 

[IAMTHESTIG]

Let's get one thing straight: Windows doesn't enhance games. Games enhance Windows.

Without games, you might as well draw the blinds and install Linux.

I agree with you... but even if all games worked with Linux, Windows would still be the "leader" in the market place. Gaming is probably a decent chunk of its user base but enterprise sized businesses is still the main consumer of Windows OS. Now if someone came up with a fully featured and reliable alternative to Active Directory, then M$ would be in deep sh**. AD is the only thing keeping them in their position.

Myself and most of my gaming buddies agree that Windows is getting worse. In fact, over half of them run Linux for everything but games. And to be completely honest if all games did work in Linux I wouldn't even use Windows.

That being said I'm still running on Windows 7 and is still plenty fast for new games. This new potential feature sounds like a gimmick to me, honestly. As long as you don't have crap running that is bogging down the CPU, and you have plenty of RAM... you'll be just fine. Modern gaming rigs are more than powerful enough to handle some background tasks. The only reason I close stuff down is to prevent crap from popping up and taking me out of my game.

I tried Windows 10 for awhile but was annoyed with it, and also ended up with a broken OS after the 1607 update so I said flunk it and went back to 7. M$ needs to get their issues figured out.

 

[Kunming]

I agree with you... but even if all games worked with Linux, Windows would still be the "leader" in the market place. Gaming is probably a decent chunk of its user base but enterprise sized businesses is still the main consumer of Windows OS. Now if someone came up with a fully featured and reliable alternative to Active Directory, then M$ would be in deep sh**. AD is the only thing keeping them in their position.

Myself and most of my gaming buddies agree that Windows is getting worse. In fact, over half of them run Linux for everything but games. And to be completely honest if all games did work in Linux I wouldn't even use Windows.

That being said I'm still running on Windows 7 and is still plenty fast for new games. This new potential feature sounds like a gimmick to me, honestly. As long as you don't have crap running that is bogging down the CPU, and you have plenty of RAM... you'll be just fine. Modern gaming rigs are more than powerful enough to handle some background tasks. The only reason I close stuff down is to prevent crap from popping up and taking me out of my game.

I tried Windows 10 for awhile but was annoyed with it, and also ended up with a broken OS after the 1607 update so I said flunk it and went back to 7. M$ needs to get their issues figured out.

Yesh, but I also hate all the effort you need to put in. I had Win 7 too and while better than 10, it just annoyed the bajingles out of me. I hate the whole IE business, pre-installed crapware, needing all sorts of utilities just to keep it running decently after a little while and of course all the security problems - even UAC is a problem. They implemented it and then later said uhhh we didn't mean it was for security, lulz and then after a couple years they find a new way to screw with you; no updates for this or that, have a pop-up join our new os and all this nonsense no-choice business

 

[Lionvibez]

Without games, you might as well draw the blinds and install Linux.

I'd love to argue with you on that, but I feel as if you are correct. Windows would die if the gaming world shifted to Linux. Because one by one everything else non-game wise would follow suite.

Disagree!

What keeps Windows alive is the enterprise market not gamers.

You need to look at the big picture and outside of your box.

The money that MS makes from gamers pales in comparison to their bread and butter the enterprise market!

 

[cliffordcooley]

What keeps Windows alive is the enterprise market not gamers.

You need to look at the big picture and outside of your box.

And gamers are the future. If gamers move to Linux, it is only a matter of time before the whole industry uses Linux more. For you to hold your stance you fail to see how the market can shift by raising kids (or adults for that matter) on Linux playing games. Yet you say I'm the one thinking inside my box. Ohh the irony!

 

[wiyosaya]

Without games, you might as well draw the blinds and install Linux.

I'd love to argue with you on that, but I feel as if you are correct. Windows would die if the gaming world shifted to Linux. Because one by one everything else non-game wise would follow suite.

Disagree!

What keeps Windows alive is the enterprise market not gamers.

You need to look at the big picture and outside of your box.

The money that MS makes from gamers pales in comparison to their bread and butter the enterprise market!

Absolutely, and this is one thing that the gamer side of the PC world misunderstands, as I see it.

M$ gives away Word and other office apps to partners. Where ever it gives away apps to partners it creates a future market for itself that is bound to it out of fear and cost of conversion from one app to another. I am sure there are other examples of "clever marketing" by M$ to the business world, too.

I am not saying that there are not apps out there that are better than Word or other M$ Office apps - personally, I use WordPerfect because it is far beyond the capabilities of Word which, IMO, was written for writing one-page memos and nothing more. Through giveaways like M$ Office apps, M$ has ingrained itself into the business world in such a manner that it would cost a substantial amount for business users to convert to anything else, and this is why M$ virtually owns the business computing market.

Gamers are a market force, yes, but the market of the business world is far greater, and the business world hates nothing more than paying anything for something.

 

[Lionvibez]

And gamers are the future. If gamers move to Linux, it is only a matter of time before the whole industry uses Linux more. For you to hold your stance you fail to see how the market can shift by raising kids (or adults for that matter) on Linux playing games. Yet you say I'm the one thinking inside my box. Ohh the irony!

If gamers move to linux I don't see my current CTO holding a staff meeting saying we are throwing all the windows desktops ,servers, application licenses out to go all linux because that's what the kids are using. We are going to an open source office now all the custom software some with custom drivers written will all go in the dumpster. He/she would get laughed out of the office on the way to the unemployment office.

Lets be realistic here for a min please!

There is plenty of linux uses in the industry but what MS has right now is untouchable currently.

 

[cliffordcooley]

If gamers move to linux I don't see my current CTO holding a staff meeting saying we are throwing all the windows desktops ,servers, application licenses out to go all linux because that's what the kids are using.

You are thinking too short term. Kids grow up and use what they grew up with. I didn't say it would happen over night.

 

[Lionvibez]

You are thinking too short term. Kids grow up and use what they grew up with. I didn't say it would happen over night.

ya but I've been hearing Linux was going to take over for 15+ years now.

how much longer do I have to wait?

 

[cliffordcooley]

ya but I've been hearing Linux was going to take over for 15+ years now.

how much longer do I have to wait?

And I'm not saying it now. I said if games were to move to Linux that would happen. There is no doubt in my mind about it. I do however doubt games moving to Linux.

 

[Morris Minor]

Seems like they are doing this because the games on Windows store are all gimped, they are run as an app in windowed mode.

 

[Hot Cheese]

Microsoft is known to ruined everything they touch... "Games for Windows Live" was an epic fail. They tried to get in the smartphone market with the Nokia and Windows OS and look what happened to that. Look how they forced the Windows 10 update upon their customers. This so call "Game mode" is gonna be a guaranteed disaster.

 

[gamerk2]

Isn't this just an admission of how bloated it's got over time? Still running Windows 7 here and background CPU usage in Process Explorer is an insignificant 1% split between "System", Interrupts and DWM (Desktop Windows Manager with Aero fully enabled). Disabling Aero drops it by all of 0.2%. Biggest single thing you can do to reduce game stutter is disable the real-time aspect of any installed anti-virus / anti-Malware scanners, and just schedule a regular full scan when you're eating dinner, grocery shopping, walking the dog, etc.

Remember though, that 1% means that one time out of a hundred, a low priority thread is bumping a thread belonging to the app you are trying to run. That bumped thread will get rescheduled sometime time in the future, on whatever CPU core is currently free. What that means is delays, especially if a high priority thread (Such as the GPU render thread) gets bumped so, for example, the clock on your desktop can update. This does produce latency, which can be significant on lower-tier processors [i3's/Pentiums in particular].

In theory, all a Game Mode would need to do is significantly reduce the priority of background processes and non-vital Windows services, so they don't bump threads of another high priority program.

 

[Evernessince]

Personally, I would rather have reliable Windows 10 updates that don't break useful things like automatic hibernation, or leave a computer completely useless for days while you try to figure out what the frack happened. When M$ masters reliable updates, then they should deliver "upgrades".

Oh wait, I forgot. Reliable updates were delivered to Windows 7. The crap updates of late make me think that M$ re-released Windows 3.1/NT and plopped "10" on it to make people think they were getting an "upgrade" while adding lots of useless bloat ware and bling to ensure that it ran slower so people would upgrade to M$ hardware.

Yep, they did indeed have good updates on Windows 7. Then they hired a cloud guy as their CEO and just had to force the cloud into everything. They fired most of their Q&A for updates and now Windows users are the field testers. They really should be giving away their OS for free at this point, it is no longer a premium product that demands a high price tag, especially with the forced ads and spyware.

 

[BSim500]

Remember though, that 1% means that one time out of a hundred, a low priority thread is bumping a thread belonging to the app you are trying to run. That bumped thread will get rescheduled sometime time in the future, on whatever CPU core is currently free. What that means is delays, especially if a high priority thread (Such as the GPU render thread) gets bumped so, for example, the clock on your desktop can update. This does produce latency, which can be significant on lower-tier processors [i3's/Pentiums in particular]. In theory, all a Game Mode would need to do is significantly reduce the priority of background processes and non-vital Windows services, so they don't bump threads of another high priority program.

Whilst I agree that's how it's likely to work (or auto-increase the foreground priority of the game you're trying to run), the bulk of that mere 1% background usage mentioned (and that was peak, it's actually averaging 0.6% comprised of 0.05% System, 0.4-0.8% Interrupts, and 0.2% DWM), is hardware interrupts, ie, responding to mouse / keyb input, etc, which if anything needs to be high-priority for fast-paced gaming. Likewise, I do have an i3 in my secondary HTPC, and after playing around with changing run priority for 10mins, quite honestly there's no measurable difference in fps at all. Trying to eek out +10% of 1% is like OCing a 3.70GHz CPU to 3.704GHz and expecting an fps boost. For Pentium / Celeron's, modern heavy AAA games will run badly anyway (if at all) simply due to lack of horsepower and sudden regular 20fps frame-dips during "busy" scenes will not be cured by turning that 20fps dip into "only" a 20.1fps, if that.

As other people have commented it seems Windows 10 "Game Mode" is less an 'enhancement' and more 'damage control' that's needed to try and counteract W10's other negative design choices that reduce performance by larger amounts. Eg, Windows Store "UWP" games seem to be forced to run in Borderless Windowed rather than Exclusive Fullscreen, the "hit" of which differs from game to game from as little as 1% to much more noticeable random stutter and significantly worse overall frame pacing. Ironically, this is why Exclusive Fullscreen was invented in the first place going all the way back to original DirectDraw was to boost performance of foreground gaming by allowing the framebuffer to be sent directly to the display instead of needing it to be copied for rendering by the compositor. W10's UWP philosophy = "One step forward, three steps back" if running games in the foreground as fast as possible was the intention.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Personally, I would rather have reliable Windows 10 updates that don't break useful things like automatic hibernation, or leave a computer completely useless for days while you try to figure out what the frack happened. When M$ masters reliable updates, then they should deliver "upgrades".

Oh wait, I forgot. Reliable updates were delivered to Windows 7. The crap updates of late make me think that M$ re-released Windows 3.1/NT and plopped "10" on it to make people think they were getting an "upgrade" while adding lots of useless bloat ware and bling to ensure that it ran slower so people would upgrade to M$ hardware.

Win 10 is just fine. You probably installed yours all wrong by letting the installation select it's installation defaults which is an unforgivable cardinal sin. Next time you redo your installation read each of the screens properly, uncheck everything (and I mean everything) and do it manually, DON'T heed what M$ suggests you do, it's only to their advantage hence you're bombarded with a whole lot of meaningless crap once done.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Sounds good but only if they decide to implement it, if not, then it's much ado about nothing... again.

 

[Flabo]

Remember though, that 1% means that one time out of a hundred, a low priority thread is bumping a thread belonging to the app you are trying to run. That bumped thread will get rescheduled sometime time in the future, on whatever CPU core is currently free. What that means is delays, especially if a high priority thread (Such as the GPU render thread) gets bumped so, for example, the clock on your desktop can update. This does produce latency, which can be significant on lower-tier processors [i3's/Pentiums in particular]. In theory, all a Game Mode would need to do is significantly reduce the priority of background processes and non-vital Windows services, so they don't bump threads of another high priority program.

Whilst I agree that's how it's likely to work (or auto-increase the foreground priority of the game you're trying to run), the bulk of that mere 1% background usage mentioned (and that was peak, it's actually averaging 0.6% comprised of 0.05% System, 0.4-0.8% Interrupts, and 0.2% DWM), is hardware interrupts, ie, responding to mouse / keyb input, etc, which if anything needs to be high-priority for fast-paced gaming. Likewise, I do have an i3 in my secondary HTPC, and after playing around with changing run priority for 10mins, quite honestly there's no measurable difference in fps at all. Trying to eek out +10% of 1% is like OCing a 3.70GHz CPU to 3.704GHz and expecting an fps boost. For Pentium / Celeron's, modern heavy AAA games will run badly anyway (if at all) simply due to lack of horsepower and sudden regular 20fps frame-dips during "busy" scenes will not be cured by turning that 20fps dip into "only" a 20.1fps, if that.

As other people have commented it seems Windows 10 "Game Mode" is less an 'enhancement' and more 'damage control' that's needed to try and counteract W10's other negative design choices that reduce performance by larger amounts. Eg, Windows Store "UWP" games seem to be forced to run in Borderless Windowed rather than Exclusive Fullscreen, the "hit" of which differs from game to game from as little as 1% to much more noticeable random stutter and significantly worse overall frame pacing. Ironically, this is why Exclusive Fullscreen was invented in the first place going all the way back to original DirectDraw was to boost performance of foreground gaming by allowing the framebuffer to be sent directly to the display instead of needing it to be copied for rendering by the compositor. W10's UWP philosophy = "One step forward, three steps back" if running games in the foreground as fast as possible was the intention.

There is no damage control to do in Windows 10. Performance are equal or better than Windows 7, for a variety. That comment about Exclusive Fullscreen is not current, I suggest you do a little research about how Windows 10 and DirectX12 does borderless fullscreen.

I don't think you understand who scheduling works in a OS, also, it would be good to understand why even Windows 7 (which is NOT better for gaming) would benefit from such a mode.